Making coffee in the french press. Even if all I have is the utility-grade ground coffee from Target that I use for my morning commute cup - making it in the press brings out its full potential. We keep standard weekday coffee in large quantities but also whole beans of "weekend coffee" which we make the labor-intensive way for a little treat usually on Sunday mornings.

Explosives that use magnesium, for that extra-bright effect. One of my childhood friends' dad worked at a machine shop that made parts out of magnesium. My friend used to go with his dad some days and brought home big shopping bags full of shavings. We used to set that shit on fire everywhere! True fact- when magnesium burns, some of the light given off is in the ultraviolet. I have an eye condition that may be related to this.

One simple pleasure this activity provided also was life-threatening. We set a 1 pound coffee can with some water in it, that had a bunch of magnesium shavings stuffed into it, in a 55 gallon barrel in my friend's back yard, and lit it off. For those of you who don't know, if you combine burning magnesium with water, it robs the oxygen out of the water, releasing hydrogen, which combines with the oxygen in the surrounding air, resulting basically in an explosion. That explosion sent flaming magnesium into the tree in his back yard. We were running around, trying to figure out what to do, realizing that if we used the garden hose to put out the fire, that would only make it worse. We ended up having to wait until the magnesium was done burning to use the hose on the rest of the tree. That poor tree had burn holes in the leaves for the rest of the year. We're lucky we didn't have burn holes in us. Good times are those that we look back on, and know that we avoided serious harm. I watched my boys (I have three sons) like a hawk, knowing what I used to do. They still did crazy shit, but I like to think that in most cases I saved them from themselves.